HARARE, Zimbabwe -- The dream is over. It's all gone Pete Tong. Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that The Central Bank of Zimbabwe has essentially abandoned its currency with the announcement that businesses can now legally conduct business in foreign currencies. This means a couple of things: among them, 1) that the starving trillionaires of Zimbabwe will continue to use US dollars for basic transactions, as they have been for months; 2) that Zimbabwean teachers, many of whom have resorted to selling their bodies on the street to earn money, might have some reason to go back to work in the coming months with the incentive of being paid in non-imaginary currency; and 3) that it no longer makes logical sense to continue printing new, obscenely high denominations of money nobody is using anyways.
So on to the really bad news, the related but much more distressing story for me: today we have news that a week or two after introducing its highest denomination bill ($100 trillion) they've knocked TWELVE more zeros off the Zim Dollar. If you've read this blog before, you know how devastating this is for me and my dream of rolling and writhing around in a bathtub teeming with cash money dollar bills, be they worthless or not. There's nothing I can do, and as a result it's probably time I start looking to other countries with floundering economies. Mother shit.A short calculation: Under the new system, one trillion ZWD now equals one ZWD. In the last five months, this country has knocked TWENTY TWO zeros off its currency. At $100 trillion, the newest bill was worth about $35USD. If the system were left unchecked... Okay that's a poor choice of words, because the system HAS been left entirely unchecked. But if the system had not made its ludicrous attempts to control inflation by cutting 22 zeros out of the equation, $0.33 USD would today be worth ten SEXTILLION ZWD, or $10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (there are something like 70 sextillion stars in our motherfucking GALAXY according to the most recent estimates). All that works out to about three and a half metric shit-tons of zeros. This kind of hyperinflation makes me finally understand why we had to learn scientific notation in high school, as when you get to numbers like these it's not even worth your time to write that many zeros. You know your country is in trouble when.
Anyways, in moderately positive news for the nation, it also looks like president Bobby "Dick" Mugabe may have finally come to a power-sharing deal with Morgan Tsvangirai, the HUGE-balled opposition leader who has in the past been kidnapped, threatened, and beaten to a pulp by Mugabe's troops. So maybe something good will come of that, but I wouldn't bet the farm just yet, as Mugabe has a promise-keeping history on par with Hitler himself ("Guys I told you already, I'm not gonna invade Czechoslovakia. Seriously. You have my word."). Because it's topical, and because Mugabe's a dick, I want to share this awesome drawing my brother Justin did of Mugabe recently:
'mr. mugabe, how do you get your powers?' (2009)Awesome.
